The first journal article on the MA thesis is out now in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), coauthored with Kenneth Cardenas. It is part of the symposium issue, “Flood Risk and Littoral Connurbations: Theorising the Asian Experience”, edited by Gavin Shatkin.

In this theoretical and empirical paper, we forward the concept of resiliency revanchism to characterise Manila’s disaster risk management (DRM) strategy, which we argue is predicated on the mass eviction and relocation of informal settlers. We trace the first shift in Philippine DRM policy to the 2009 Ondoy floods, and cast critical attention on the ways the disaster was constructed, as well as the manner by which flooding projections and solutions further marginalise ‘vulnerable’ yet undesirable populations. We deploy the concepts of “risk society” (Ulrich Beck, 1992, 2009), “territorial stigmatisation” (Loic Wacquant, 2007, also Tom Slater, 2016), and “aesthetic governmentality” (Asher Ghertner, 2015) to examine how the deliberate production of ignorance by disaster and climate expertise (knowledges produced by state officials, DRM practitioners, environmental and climate advocates, and academics) constructed anti-slum discourses of urban flooding and disaster, which in turn produced uneven landscapes of risk and resilience (via the creation of a ‘danger zone’/high-risk zone binary) that justified slum evictions in ‘building back better’.

The image below links to the full text version.